Lyft, General Motors and the future of driverless waste management and recycling

The recent news about General Motors' 500 million dollars investment in Lyft, laid out GM's plans to develop an on-demand network of self-driving cars with the ride-sharing service. "We think our business and personal mobility will change more in the next five years than the last 50," GM President Dan Ammann said in an interview with Reuters. The announcement came as Toyota Motor Corp and Ford Motor Co said they would adopt the same software to link smartphone apps to vehicle dashboard screens. Toyota and Ford, two of the world's biggest automakers, invited rival car companies to join them to counter the push by Apple, Alphabet, Tesla Motors Inc and others into self-driving cars, or what the industry calls autonomous vehicles. So, it is time to warm up the discussion about driverless cars' use in waste management and recycling issues. And as you probably imagine, driverless cars fit perfectLy with robotics and artificial intelligence. 

Robotics

Robots are already here. More than 22 millions of them are in use in several industrial applications, continuously working and connected to the Web. Although they have been proved both much more difficult and expensive than it was initially expected, the combination of robots with the new sensors and the advances of artificial intelligence have set the scene for an exponential growth of robotics within next 5-10 years.

Robots are already in use in the waste management industry. Back to 2010, Mitsubishi and Osaka University researchers presented a robot that identifies different plastic materials among rubbish and sorts them into piles. SADAKO in Spain has created a commercial model (Wall-B) able to sort mixed household waste, equipped with a suction system adapted to small, light and very heterogeneous target objects. The Finnish company Zen Robotics is focused in C&D waste, with its robot capable of replacing up to 15 human waste sorters.  VOLVO is currently working on a joint venture to develop a robot that interacts with the refuse truck and its driver to accomplish the work.

The potential benefits of using robots are countless but it seems that their use will be controversial: robots will replace hundreds of thousands or even millions of workers in recycling and waste management, creating a huge negative social impact and intense conflicts.

Artificial Intelligence, driverless cars and drones

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already reshaping our lives. Either it is the rapid response of Google to any search we made or the speech recognition, AI has become a business as usual element of the daily lives of billions. Driverless cars and drones are equipped with advanced AI systems that are working in combination with powerful sensors. Their evolution goes really fast.

It is no surprise that many car manufacturers are beginning to think about cars that take the driving out of your hands altogether. These cars will be safer, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient than their manual counterparts. Yet, there are several issues to be resolved, but it seems that we are on the way to resolve them. If the experts are right, the most important problems will be managed before 2020.

Google recently announced that by 2017 they would start to deliver packages with drones, on a massive scale. Amazon has already published its first efforts to use drones for delivering its products. The US Federal Aviation Agency is working hard to complete a drones traffic management system until the end of 2016 and the first US database with legally licensed drones will be completed next month.

Driverless collection of recyclables will not be that difficult in certain parts of the world. And if you imagine a drone delivering your supermarket supplies to your window and taking back your recyclables, you probably are close to a reality that’s on the way. 

The consequences to traditional waste management will be tremendous. On demand hybrid collection services will become mainstream and the road towards a completely automatic and auto-optimized collection system will open. Important cost reduction is expected by the use of drones and driverless cars, but first there must be substantial investments. But, there is a high risk of more or less jobless collection and recycling systems, especially in the most technologically advanced places of the world. 

However, there is a very interesting comment on the future of driverless cars. Dave King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University, in a recent interview at Washington Post mentions that the future of driverless cars is not going to be like we think. Well, let's continue the debate...

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - how about the recycling and waste industry?

Few hours before the official release of the new Star Wars sequel (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) the buzz about the movie has skyrocketed. Harrison Ford revealed how his leg was almost broken by hydraulic forces. The new movie is expected by decades of millions of impatient Star Wars fans. But the same is true for the reaction of the waste management industry to the tsunami of the third industrial revolution - I dare to write that we need something like a rapid awakening and paradigm shift in order to surf on the huge waves of the current technological, social and economic change. 

"Our world is becoming more controversial than ever. We are capable to identify the quantity and quality of water in March, in a distance which ranges between 35  -100 million km but, due to poverty and lack of appropriate global response, roughly 700 million people (1 to 10) lack access to safe water. We are discussing how to utilize the Internet of Things in industrialized economies but, according the recent ISWA’s “Wasted Health: The tragic case of dumpsites” report, the health impacts of dumpsites are worst than malaria in India, Indonesia and Philippines. On the bright side, the third industrial revolution creates new, unimaginable opportunities for making sustainability a cornerstone of each and every industrial sector. On the dark side, the recent “Global Waste Management Outlook” (GWMO) report revealed that roughly 2-3 billion people lack the most elementary waste services while

As far as we know, industrial revolutions are long historical waves that gradually cover the planet. In reality, even now, there are parts of our world that have not been so much affected by the second industrial revolution. So no one expects that the third industrial revolution would soon transform the whole planet. But the current industrial revolution is based on technologies that follow exponential rather than linear paths of development – practically it means that the change that is coming will be too big and too fast. And this change is happening with the current shift of power (from global “north” to global “south”) and the continuously growing global interconnectivity. It is expected that the current industrial revolution will affect mostly the developing world (roughly 40% of the planet’s population). The poorer part of the world will benefit much more than the richer one, for the first time in the history of industrial revolutions.

In this rapidly changing landscape, disruption of traditional industries will very soon be the new “business as usual”. A recent IDC report, published on November 4 this year, predicts that by 2020 one third of the top 20 firms, in every industry, will be seriously disrupted or even failed. The recycling and waste management industry seems unprepared for substantial changes – unfortunately, a good, even if complicated and expensive, adaptation plan is not enough. What is coming is a radical redefinition of what is called waste and how it will be managed."  

Well, this is the introduction of my new article "Third industrial revolution and the future of recycling" that was published yesterday at the Waste Management World magazine (November - December 2015 issue) - you can register for free and enjoy the whole article plus a great content from many important contributors. If you want to continue click here